Why McCloud chooses to provide us with a grisly axe murder to teach us about gutters rather than a more wholesome scene is unknown, but I like it. I like it alot.
I especially like McCloud's metaphor on p. 67 in which he refers to closure as the grammar of comics and visual iconography as the vocabulary. So what is the gutter, then? The place in the brain where the language, all these icons and images and words, are made into meaning?
Interestingly, McCloud chooses to discuss the gutter between panels before he actually discusses panels themselves. This didn't strike me as particularly jarring or backwards at the time, but when I started to return to the text I thought it was a little bit bizarre. To really understand how comic artists get the most of the gutters, you have to know how the gutter functions in relation to the panels, right? Any thoughts on why McCloud chose to discuss these two aspects of comic art in this order?
My only theory is that it relates to the nature of the discussions themselves. His discussion on gutters is brief, and part of a more abstract discussion of closure and sense in comics, where his discussion on panels is a little more concrete. He really can't describe the phenomenon of closure in comics without talking about the gutters. It's kind of like if you had to describe what a sandwich was to your backwards cousin who'd never heard of the phenomenon of sandwiches before. You'd probably tell them what a sandwich was in general before you'd start talking about all of the specific materials that comprise a sandwich, but I bet somewhere in your description you are going to have to mention bread, and probably explain what bread is.
That backwards cousin metaphor is awful, but it's so awful I'm keeping it, and hopefully returning to it as often as possible this semester.
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